Lightroom Classic AI Tools - Game Changer or just another Tool Set?

 

Artificial Intelligence is taking over. That's what we hear everywhere. I hope it isn't. But let me explain.

I have written elsewhere that I am not afraid of AI. Mankind deserves a lesson in humiliation, as Richard Dawkins said. We are not as clever as we think we are. Probably, many of us know this, and consequently get afraid of AI. Unless we allow AI to become human like and live among us like our sisters and brothers, which we definitely shouldn't do, we should not worry. They are only machines. If a robot brakes, it gets trashed. That's the difference. But back to photography.

The hottest topic in photography is AI generated images. You can now generate or modify images with a bit of description. I see that stock photographers don't welcome this development. It may hurt their business model. One should also keep in mind that AI generated content is based on real world photographs, possibly violating copyrights. This should be sorted out in the court. But for those wedding, event or portrait photographers, I see no reason to worry. After all, they have the real thing to deal with.

This posting is about the usage of AI as a tool. And I am not even talking about the most complex form, the generative fill. This kind of manipulation allows to change big chunks of the image to something that fits in, or even something, that you describe with words. 

E.g., you can put a squirrel into a picture with no effort. A close inspection of the image below shows that this is by not perfect yet. The squirrel looks like a cartoon because of its textures. And the front feet are from another animal. Strange.

Moreover, Lightroom uses 1024x1024 pixels to train the AI currently. Consequently, the image will look blurry if you use the fill for larger areas. This does not matter if a person is replaced from the blurred background, but will destroy images if the new area must be sharp. However, my major complaint is that part of the image will be invented and may have no relation to reality. I won't use this besides for small removals.

The new tools that I use most often are the new masking tools. Have a look at the image on the start of this posting. In this image, you can effortlessly detect the mushrooms as the main subject of the image. You can then intersect the mask with a color range or with a linear mask. This allows nice manipulations of the brightness, clarity or other changes. 

For this image, I also copied the mask inverted and blurred the background with the clarity and structure sliders. There is even a new AI tool do just this, similar to the artificial portrait mode of some modern smartphones. I found this not perfect enough to be useful yet.

Another AI tool I applied for this hand-held shot is the new denoise. This is better than the existing toolset, but not much, provided the old tools are applied correctly. There is also a new option to double the resolution in each dimension. I see no use for this tool for my personal photography.

There are a lot more AI tools now in Photoshop. I reserve the discussion of these for future postings. Finally, another image taken at high ISO and very bad light, improved with the new AI denoise.